Three-Martini Lunch

by Suzanne Rindell

  “How about we all go up to the roof,” I said, and everyone but Swish shot me a smile of relief. The great political debate was dropped as we headed in the direction of where Bobby and the Andrews Sisters had disappeared minutes earlier by climbing out the open window and up the fire escape.

  The roof was really the only place for the party to go. Over the first few months following our honeymoon we had discovered the apartment was tolerable for two people, but only by a slim margin. Certainly it was much too small to host a full party, so one by one people crawled out the fire escape and climbed up the rusted iron ladder that led to the roof.

  When I got to the top of the ladder I inhaled a lungful of thick sickly sweet air and I knew Bobby had decided to try the hashish. As a group we mostly smoked tea and not hash, because sometimes hash gave you bad returns at the end of the night, but it’s also true that whatever Bobby did we were all likely to follow suit and so it wasn’t long before everyone on the roof was smoking the hash and it turned out to be okay stuff. The temperature was pleasant and the night sky seemed wide-open and almost ghostly as it glowed with the dim buzz of a million refracted city lights. Pal called up to us from the fire escape to lower the bucket and rope that we kept on the roof. When we lowered it he filled the bucket up with bottles of beer and whiskey and vodka and we hauled it all up and after that the party had officially moved to the roof for good.

  Once we’d settled into our new location, some of us stood holding drinks and talking, some of us jazzed about to the music floating up from the windows below, and some of us spread old blankets on the tarred ground and lay down to smoke and look up at the sky. Eden and I found a dark corner and got to talking. I took her small, fine-boned hand in mine and thought again of how wise I’d been to marry her.

  • • •

  I didn’t notice when Rusty and Miles disappeared from the party and neither did anyone else, but later when we tried to figure it out we guessed it must’ve been an hour or so after we all adjourned to the roof that Rusty was bold enough to slip the Amytal into Miles’s drink. I heard that, just like the bennies, Rusty had gotten the Amytal off his old aunt with all the health problems. In any case, wherever Rusty got the stuff he gave Miles that night he must’ve underestimated Miles’s body weight and tolerance, because when we heard the ruckus coming from the little antechamber of a shack that enclosed the air shaft over the building’s main stairwell, we opened the door and there was Miles thrashing around with a discombobulated groggy sort of violence, giving Rusty a real ring-dinger of a black eye as his arms and legs flailed out in all directions and he fought against the effects of the drug.

  It took us a while to react. We were all still very stoned on the hash, which had turned out to be smooth enough but very strong. We stood staring at the two struggling figures in a state of shock as they thrashed about and before long Rusty had a bloody nose to go along with his black eye. Blood and snot poured down in a pattering dribble as Rusty bent over to pull up his trousers, which were still around his ankles. The motion of it set off a new wave of terror in Miles afresh and his muscular back jerked against the stairwell door inside the rooftop antechamber. He thrashed about, and then all at once the rusted chain that had likely kept that door sealed for the better part of two decades broke loose and the door flew open. Miles staggered through it and stumbled wildly down the stairs in a horrible, sickening way that made my stomach lurch; it was like watching a confused animal fight for its life.

  We stood there listening to the sounds of Miles thump and tumble his way down the stairs. I didn’t move until I heard the familiar clatter of the building’s front door. At that point Eden and I dashed to the other side of the roof to peer over. Far down below, Miles limped blindly out into oncoming traffic. Although it was difficult to tell from his body language, I think in his confused state he was trying to hail a cab. Several taxi drivers avoided him until finally one pulled over. Seeing too late his passenger was a crazed colored man in torn clothing, the driver tried to pull away from the curb but was ultimately saddled with Miles as his fare.

  With shock and shame we all turned to look at Rusty.

  The party was more or less over after that. People trickled down from the roof and out the front door of our apartment talking in private rumbling voices about where to go next. I took Rusty downstairs to the bathroom down the hall from our apartment and gave him some towels and told him to clean himself up. I shut the door. I didn’t want to watch him fix up his cuts and scrapes and I sure as hell didn’t want to help him. When Rusty emerged forty-five minutes later, he limped quietly down the hallway without so much as glancing back into the apartment at us and we watched him make his pathetic journey to the stairs, looking a little like a pirate hobbling along on a peg-leg. Just like that, he disappeared without another word.

  The mere fact I had helped him with the towels meant Eden wouldn’t look me in the eye for the rest of the evening. When we finally switched out the lights and lay down on the mattress on the floor that night, she turned the cold moonlit expanse of her back to me and in a voice so soft it was barely audible murmured: We led him to the fucking slaughter.

  I reached for her hand but she pulled it away.

  MILES

  39

  I slept for days. The occasional sound of Wendell yelling in the living room drifted into my bedroom, and even further, into my dreams, but I could not care. At regular intervals, my mother bustled in and out, depositing plates of food and later, seeing them untouched, clearing them away. She washed in and out like the tide. Cob materialized at my bedside, pushing his Coke bottles up the bridge of his nose, holding up a glass jar, showing off a cicada in the process of molting. The grotesque sight of it entered my nightmares, slowly bursting out of its own body like a monster in a horror movie, leaving behind a dead, brittle sculpture of itself still gripping a broken branch.

  On the third day, I got up and looked at myself in the mirror.

  Even in its worst state, the cicada was more attractive by a long shot.

  Janet could not understand why I insisted on saying good-bye over the telephone as opposed to meeting her, as we had planned, in our usual spot in the park. But it was time to go. As soon as I could stand upright without seeing purple spots, I packed a small suitcase and made my way to Port Authority, where I purchased a ticket for a Greyhound. I sat in the back. The engine rumbled to life. We plunged into the Lincoln Tunnel and came up into the light. Marshland and factories. Pitch pine and birch flashing by in chaotic rows, soldiers breaking ranks on the battlefield. Hour by hour, mile by mile, the earth began to flatten. The driver braked at hamburger stands, rest stops. The bus shuddered each time the engine was cut. I imagined the death rattle of a dinosaur. Faces changed, a revolving cast of characters. Smells of grease, of garlic, of cigarettes, of body odor. A tuba was lugged on and carried off. A little girl threw her doll out the window and was spanked very horribly and publicly for all the passengers on the bus to witness.

  Woods gave way to corn, corn to wheat, wheat to desert, desert to mountains. A bizarre feeling of disbelief each time the scenery matched expectation: red barn over the cornfield, cartoonish cactus standing in one-armed salute amidst sand, tumbleweed. Everything as different as you could want from New York, everything exactly as promised. The final leg, craggy granite melting into a valley, into foothills and oaks, folds of land opening at last upon the nickel-colored bay. Soaring over the bridge and into the heart of San Francisco, tinge of salt in the air.

  Later that night, under the dim bulb in the cramped bathroom of my hotel room, my face in the mirror revealed a map of healing: faint traces of yellows, purples, and indigo dying out under the canvas of my skin. A scab like a thick leathery patch on my cheek, beginning to fall off. An exoskeleton to leave behind.

  “What happened to you?” a nosy woman in the bus seat next to me had asked, meaning my face.

  “An accident,” I said.
r />   I should have answered, I am molting.

  I climbed into bed, muscles sore from disuse, bones still vibrating from the rumble of a phantom engine. Images flashed against the black screen of my closed eyelids. Those last nights in Manhattan. Rusty. Cob and his cicada. Trees flashing by, tick-tick-tick, until they transformed into steel bridge girders and petered out at the end of the earth. The task still before me. Always the thought of my father.

  40

  Rusty had, for better or worse, pushed me forward on my mission. It’s strange to think, but the journey is so linked in my mind to my healing bruises, I cannot imagine it otherwise.

  It was already late morning when I finally rose the next day but I didn’t know it at first; the hour was masked by the gray fog out my window. I was soon to discover what a curious place San Francisco was. The fog collected on tree leaves in the park, dribbled from eaves in the neighborhoods, and made sentimental tears on the stone façades downtown. I gazed in wonder at the white wedding cake of buildings that made up its skyline and the gingerbread shapes of its funny, colorfully painted houses. Cable cars clattered up hills and thundered down them, the brakeman straining at his lever. Honeymooners wandered hand-in-hand along Fisherman’s Wharf, where a saxophonist dueled with an organ-grinder for attention. Hipsters with unwashed hair read poetry on the lawn in Washington Square while leathery-faced Italians played loud, intense card games on folding tables beside the church where Joe DiMaggio and Marilyn Monroe famously posed for wedding photographs.

  The city struck a stark contrast to everything I’d known growing up in New York. Manhattan is concrete and ambition, steam rising from a manhole in winter, a hot blast from a subway grate in summer. Its inner workings grind away at all hours, purring in the name of commerce. New York streets are distinctly sultry—especially in Harlem. The defining sights and smells are those that humans make. The eye-catching colors of shop signs, of awnings, of advertisements. The scent of meat being grilled, of ladies’ powdery perfumes, of sour body odor—all this mixing with the cabbagey smell of garbage hovering on the street curbs.

  I found that in San Francisco the vibrancy of life was not so much evinced by the enormity of man-made ambitions as it was embedded in the nature that surrounded the city; its brilliance was cached in the cypress trees that leaned romantically against the hills, the glitter of the bay, the startling patches of blue sky that occasionally broke through the fog. This was what inspired and enlivened the young people and artists in the city, what called to starry-eyed couples and nostalgic bohemians. I took a walk in Golden Gate Park. It had a peculiar tang about it that took some getting used to at first—some sort of herbaceous pungency that at times smelled incredibly fresh and clean, and at other times sharp and feral, not unlike cat piss. It seemed to emanate from the wet bark of the eucalyptus trees, intensified by the cool, crisp breeze of the Pacific.

  Just before I’d left for Port Authority, Cob had armed me with a handful of tiny glass jars. Now I sat down on a large tree stump at the top of a hill in the middle of Stow Lake and made a haphazard attempt to collect a few insects that might interest him. I caught a beetle with an iridescent blackish-green shell that struck me as exotic. I dropped it in the jar and admired it in the light, a rainbow of colors hidden in the green.

  The truth was: I was stalling.

  I’d come all the way across the country but couldn’t face the next step, and there was safety in failure. I had never truly believed my father had been a hero in the First World War, and I certainly didn’t believe he’d been a hero in the Second. If I never found my father’s locker, I could never be disappointed by anything he’d written in his journal. Moreover, I could never be disappointed if the locker turned out to be empty altogether. I was preventing one tragedy by ensuring another.

  But then I pictured coming home, having spent my savings, having spent my mother’s one hundred dollars. My mother, who worked so hard. There would be questions about my trip when I got home, a demand that I tell the tale of my efforts. Lying was out of the question. It was in my personality to omit—I was adept in the art of omission—but I could not tell outright lies. Not to my mother. An hour passed as I sat nursing that paralyzed feeling in the park, until finally the thought of reporting back to my mother empty-handed sickened me more than the thought of making an attempt to locate my father’s locker. When the balance finally tipped, I stood up, pocketed Cob’s jars, and brushed the dust from my slacks.

  Where to begin? I hadn’t imagined actually arriving in San Francisco; for months it had remained so safely, so thoroughly far away. I was at a loss at what to do next. I decided the most sensible tactic would be to retrace my father’s footsteps. My father’s regiment had deployed from the wharves down at Fort Mason; I decided that was where I would begin.

  It was sunny by the time I walked down to the gatehouse near the marina. I could see several enormous dull-gray ships at the docks and the navy bay glittering in the distance beyond. A couple of military trucks were lined up at the checkpoint while men in uniforms flashed their identification to a man who stood by a doorway and made note of their comings and goings. I hesitated. The official nature of the scene was intimidating. I hadn’t quite thought this part through. Here I was, three thousand miles from home, and I hadn’t planned for one more step. I approached the gatehouse cautiously.

  “Where’s your uniform, soldier?” the man asked, frowning at me and clutching a clipboard.

  “I . . .” I stammered. “I’m a civilian.”

  He frowned at my bruises. “What’s your business here?”

  I explained to him about my father, the key, the locker. He seemed less than enthralled by my story, wearing a distracted expression as he nodded several men in uniform through the gate while I talked.

  “No footlockers on the premises here, buddy,” he said once I’d finished explaining. “But even if there were, I couldn’t let you come on base and rummage around. This ain’t a public amusement park, you know; it’s a military base, property of the United States Army.”

  I realized I was being turned away, and sudden panic clamped down on my throat. I coughed. “Maybe you could just tell me—”

  “Like I said, this ain’t a tourist office. Move it along; we got a job to do here,” the man said with an air of finality. Scornful, he waved me off, but I remained frozen, blinking at him with dismay. “Look, buddy, we got a bunch of boys coming back from Korea who never expected to stay there half so long, so if you don’t mind, we’re a little busy around here.” His wave transformed into a shooing gesture and his attention turned to a truck waiting to be cleared for entry.

  If there had been a way to slam a literal door in my face and continue to man his post, I’m sure he would have. Either way, the effect was the same. Bewildered, I walked away from the marina, following Van Ness as it sloped uphill in the general direction of my hotel. I wanted to lie down, think, regroup. I was staggered by the foolishness of the cowardice I’d been struggling with earlier that day in the park, putting off trying for fear of succeeding; now it dawned on me there was a very real chance success may not even be possible. For the first time, it struck me what a naïve undertaking this was: My mother had handed me a key and sent me on a quest, and here I was following this singular clue, like an idiotic character in a fairy tale. What had I expected? The world suddenly felt very vast, and I felt very small. I was colored, in a strange city, and worst of all for my purposes: a civilian searching for a footlocker on a military base.

  Back at my hotel I rested on the rickety springs of my bed, staring up at the ceiling, thinking of what to do. I would keep trying, I supposed. There was nothing else I could do, and there were other Army installations to try. I would make a list, take the logical steps. One at a time; one foot after the other. I would try until I ran out of money. No one could blame me if I tried until I ran out of money.

  41

  The next day, I tried the Presidi
o. The day after that, I took the ferry across the bay to try Fort Baker, in Sausalito. I even took a bus out to Treasure Island, on the off chance my father had passed through the naval base, and that I might be admitted there. Each time, I met the same result. Thwarted and frustrated, I found myself beginning to while away my remaining afternoons at the main branch of the library. It was located near the plaza that contained the opera house, ballet, and courthouses, in that oddly Parisian yet somewhat derelict civic heart of the city. I walked among the aisles of heavily pruned plane trees, listening to the sharp flap of bird wings, eyeing the dust of pigeon feathers. I found my way into the library, and always returned to the same sections: the periodicals, the microfiche room. I was searching, I realized, for evidence to support—or disprove—Clarence’s claim. I scanned every headline that contained any mention of the 369th Regiment. I started by focusing on 1943 to 1945 but soon after expanded my search. The only thing I discovered was how little news coverage the 369th Regiment had received during the Second World War. It was possible, too, I realized, that a murder overseas might not be reported by the Army, as military investigations were not required to abide by civilian rules.

  In the evenings I took walks, often winding up in a bar or coffee shop. One evening, my wanderings led me into the heart of North Beach. As I strolled up Columbus Avenue, the thin wails of live jazz floated out from the buildings here and there and drifted across my path on the sidewalk until I found myself finally lured into a club. I pushed through an upholstered leather door to a dark, humid cave filled with people bobbing their heads and tapping their feet to some very lively bebop. Everyone’s face shone with sweat and smiles, from the single girl at the corner of the bar all the way to the elevated space where the band played. The musicians onstage possessed solid talent; I could tell they were immigrants to the West, bringing with them the voice and attitude of the opposite coast, and here was a vestige of Harlem that warmed me as I heard it. I perched on a stool at the bar and soon enough the bartender came over to take my order.